Translation produces meaningful versions of textual information. But what is a
text? What is translation? What is meaning? And what is a translational version?
This book "On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation" responds
to those and other eternal translation-theoretical questions from a semiotic
point of view.

Dinda L. Gorlée notes that in this world of interpretation and translation,
surrounded by our semio-translational universe "perfused with signs," we can intuit
whether or not an object in front of us (dis)qualifies as a text. This spontaneous
understanding requires no formalized definition in order to "happen" in the
receivers of text-signs. The author further observes that translated signs are not
only intelligible for target audiences, but also work together as a "theatre of
consciousness" or a "theatre of controversy" which the author views as powered
by Charles S. Peirce's three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

This book presents the virtual community of translators as emotional, dynamical,
intellectual but not infallible semioticians. They translate text-signs from one
language and culture into another, thus creating an innovative sign-milieu packed
with intuitive, dynamic, and changeable signs. Translators produce fleeting and
fallible text-translations, with obvious errors caused by ignorance or misguided
knowledge. Text-signs are translatable, yet there is no such thing as a perfect or
"final" translation. And without the ongoing creating of translated signs of all
kinds, there would be no novelty, no vagueness, no manipulation of texts and--for
that matter--no semiosis.